Saturday, November 23, 2024
A meme level of understanding is how a senior level director of federal budget policy at The Center for American Progress described Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s understanding of the Federal Budget in an article for Rolling Stone.
I think he was being generous. Musk had earlier said he was going to trim two trillion in wasteful spending from the budget. That’s quite a statement given that in 2024 the budget was $6.75 trillion. So he’s going to cut between 25 and 33%?
Larry Summers pointed out that if all the Federal employees were let go the budget that would only do 15% of the budget. Barely halfway there.
Musk and Ramaswamy want to cut items that were “unauthorized.” Well, great. But as people who were interviewed who actually know how the budget works – there is no unauthorized spending.
There is a kind of two step process that Congress uses: approval and authorization. Funds may be approved and authorized, but over time the authorization may lapse, because sometimes the law is written to have Congress approve spending but authorize its specific use year by year. It is still approved. This allows an agency to shift resources if the need arrises and then get authorization from Congress later.
There are a number of programs that are currently unauthorized. So Musk and Vivek want to cut ‘em. I wonder if they even looked to see what exactly was unauthorized at the moment? RS listed some and I’ve added a few others:
Health Care for Veterans,
Housing Assistance,
Homeland Security,
Judiciary,
Education and Workforce,
…
The list goes on and on.
But the point is these programs are covered under approval and it is considered a technical step for the authorization.
So I spent under ten minutes reading the article and I have to say I know more than the tag team of Musk and Vivek. But I got an idea. Let’s look at how much Musk’s companies get in government funding and suggest we slash all of that? I’m sure there’s waste there. I mean who didn’t see that rocket of his blow up? How much did that cost? So wasteful. Oh, you learned alot did you? On my dime? Go to community college and pay for it yourself. Stop sucking off the government mammary. Easy.
In other news we lead the world in death by gun like 38,000 to 500. If we are so great but we can’t figure out how to stop the shootings?
Did you know that one billion seconds is 3o years? I just learned that today. Gives you an idea of just how much a trillion would be.
What really scares me is what could be happening in the shadows while all this chaos inducing shit gets flung about. So much true evil out there.
Deevolution, and Idiocracy are real.